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Profile of Mohamed Amin (MCQ’s founder)
Author: Harvey Shepherd
Source: The Gazette (Montreal), September 30, 1995, p. H4
Original title: Prominent Montreal Muslim to found psychiatric clinic in Pakistan
In about 10 days, the Muslim community of Montreal will lose a man who has played a key role in developing its institutions over three decades of dramatic growth.
Mohammed Amin, also a psychiatrist, plans to keep on building.
Amin, who arrived in Montreal on Feb. 1, 1965 – “the day Canada got its flag” – and is a Canadian citizen, will be returning to the Indian subcontinent, perhaps for a year, perhaps permanently. He plans to set up an experimental psychiatric clinic in Islamabad, Pakistan.
But Islam, rather than psychiatry, was the subject of a recent conversation that took place before and after sunset prayers at the premises of the Muslim Community of Quebec, the community centre and mosque on Chester Ave. in N.D.G., of which Amin has been president most of the time since it was founded in 1979.
In 1965, the year of Amin’s arrival in Canada, a Gazette item estimated Montreal’s Muslim population at 1,500. The 1991 census reported 44,930 Muslims in Quebec.
Life is very different for Montreal’s Muslims now than when he arrived in the city, Amin said. And despite the vigorous growth of the community and its institutions, the change has not all been for the better -except, probably in the long run.
“Anonymity was the fate of the Muslim in Montreal in the 1960s and it saved us from all kinds of attacks. Now that people know us, it has become more challenging to be a Muslim. Because it is more challenging, we feel we have to look within ourselves.
“Eventually, I think that will mean that we will become better Muslims.”
Amin was born 60 years ago in Bombay, the son of a businessman, and studied in India, Pakistan and England before coming to Canada and McGill University, lured by the reputation of its medical faculty and the pioneering work of McGill’s Heinz Lehmann in the psychiatric use of drugs.
Since then, he has practiced at the Reddy Memorial, the Lakeshore General and, mainly, the Douglas Hospital.
In his view, he is in a long tradition of harmony between Islam and medicine. The first Muslim physician was one of the Prophet Mohammed’s wives.
As is Amin’s wife, by the way. Nasim Yusuf is an endocrinologist, specializing the the glandular system. In addition to a regular professional practice, she held consultation evenings at the Chester Ave. centre for immigrant Muslims who felt uncomfortable with the regular medical system or were ineligible for medicare.
Amin said there had been organized Muslim worship in Montreal at least as far back as the late 1950s, but his arrival in the city coincided with the opening of the first mosque that survives today, the Islamic Centre of Quebec in St. Laurent.
Amin’s role as a leader in the Muslim community dates especially from 1979, when he and associates opened the Muslim Community of Quebec centre.
“We need to develop institutions in order to safeguard the Muslim presence in this part of the world,” Amin said.
He said that a basic idea behind the MCQ is that a mosque should not just be a prayer hall.
The MCQ organizes community activities, including speakers. It also welcomes visitors of other faiths who want to find out more about Muslims. They are welcome at any time, he said, but particularly at the pot-luck suppers about 6 p.m. winters and 7 p.m. summers on the first Saturday of every month.
The MCQ has to struggle to survive financially, he said. Many of Montreal’s Muslims are recent immigrants struggling to get by themselves.
Also, a mosque cannot have members; it has to be for anyone who wants to pray there. There are about 300 identifiable financial supporters.
Amin said there is normally a full-time spiritual leader or “imam” at the mosque, although the position has sometimes been vacant and the incumbent, Bilal Kuspinar, is on a leave of absence.
Ordinary supporters with a good knowledge of the Koran and prayers are largely responsible for leading worship.
Among the services associated with the MCQ, Amin’s pride and joy is the Muslim Schools of Quebec, founded in 1985 and now with almost 300 students in all elementary and secondary grades, kindergarten through Grade 11. Operating under the same legal framework as other private schools, it teaches the full Quebec curriculum as well as Arabic and Islamic subjects.
Amin said that, with an enrolment of 300 out of what he estimates to be 18,000 school-age Muslim children in greater Montreal, the Muslim Schools of Montreal hardly pose much of a threat.
Besides, there is a fair amount of transferring back and forth between the Chester Ave. school and the public schools as families move, for example, or decide to profit from programs or physical amenities not available at Chester Ave.
Amin said the Chester Ave. school has made it a point to have some non-Muslims on its staff.
Ironically, this policy contributed to the school becoming a focus of controversy last winter, when the media reported that it was requiring non-Muslim women on its staff to wear traditional scarves.
The school dropped the requirement in February.
The MCQ also helped organize a housing co-operative, which is trying to make it easier for Montreal Muslims to obey their religion’s rules against usury.
Islam favors honest profit on goods and services, Amin said, but teaches that “money cannot beget money.” Muslims are not supposed to lend or borrow money at interest.
Clearly, a great many Montreal Muslims have conventional mortgages nevertheless. But the MCQ would like to do what it can to at least provide an alternative.
The co-op uses money from investors to buy houses; there are now eight. The eventual buyer moves in, pays both rent and, as his circumstances permit, makes interest-free repayments of principal until he owns the house outright.
The MCQ also purchases an hour a week on a local radio station for information programming, half in English and half in French, intended in part to offset what Amin and others regard as a frequently distorted view of Islam in the secular media.
The project that is taking Amin back to Asia is not an Islamic project in any narrow sense, he said.
The clinic in Islamabad is to be one of an experimental group set up in several countries under the auspices of an international organization of 12 psychiatrists from several countries.
But Amin’s decision to go to Islamabad is related to his Islamic beliefs in at least one way. In the Koran, he said, “it is clearly stated that we are all accountable to God -according to our potential.”